Category: Laravel

I looked up a few tutorials online on how to install Laravel and I got to the point where composer was giving me an error saying that i needed to upgrade to PHP 5.5. Since I had 5.4 running on the server and also had quite a lot of stuff already running on this server I was left in a difficult position where I needed to install Laravel and it seemed like I was required to install PHP 5.6 or 5.5. These are not supported by the default repos with CentOS. Going down the road of using custom repos is just asking for trouble, so I decided to find a way to do this without having to upgrade. So here is how I installed Laravel using PHP 5.4.

I am going to assume that you already have apache and php installed and running on your server.

Install Composer

I looked around and everyone was saying to run a bunch of stuff to download and compile composer. Seems like a waste of time when it was available using yum. I’m not sure if this is required, but you should install the epel repo to make sure you can install everything you need.

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yum install epel-release

yum install composer

Thats it, composer is installed. Sure beats having to do a bunch of weird stuff to get it installed.

Install Laravel

Based on the official documentation for installing Laravel 5 http://laravel.com/docs/5.0 there are 2 different ways to install. I first tried to do it via the laraval new method and this worked, but it messed up. It seemed like the version of php I was running did not live up to the requirements. I don’t know why, so i tried the second option and this worked! To do this i ran the following commands.

This will begin the install process which can take some time as it does a whole load of stuff. Half way through i got an error message saying I needed a GitHub access token in order to continue further. Thankfully i already have a github account, but if you do not then you will need to create one.

To get a GitHub access token, follow this guide. https://help.github.com/articles/creating-an-access-token-for-command-line-use/

Enter the Github access token and it will continue with the install.

Once installed this should be it. If you go to the laravel/public directory in your browser you should see the default Laravel page. If you get an error 500 then it is likely due to apache not having write permissions. This can be fixed with the chown command.

This is quite a common issue that can be caused by a few different things, all of which are very simple to fix.

If this is a fresh install then the first thing that you should check is your Apache conf file since this is likely the cause. Apaches conf file is usually located in “/etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf”, but this may vary depending on your set-up. In this file you will need to modify the ‘Directory’ block on your virtual host. Update the contents of the directory block to contain the following

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<Directory"/var/www/laravel/public">

AllowOverride All

<Directory>

Your virtual host should look like this. Once you have added this to the conf file, save the file and restart Apache.

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<VirtualHost *:80>

ServerName www.laravel.com

ServerAlias laravel.com

DocumentRoot"/var/www/laravel/public

<Directory "/var/www/laravel/public">

Options FollowSymLinks

AllowOverride All

Order allow,deny

Allow from all

</Directory>

</VirtualHost>

Now you should now longer need to have index.php at the end of the url. If you have done the above and it still is not working then you will need to have a look at the rewrite rule in your .htaccess file to make sure it’s working correctly. If you do not have the mod_rewrite plugin installed then you will need to install it, but Im going to assume you have this installed since it is installed by default. The default .htaccess file generated by laravel contains some code that might be causing you issues. If you remove the following lines from your .htaccess the issue should immediately go away.

Installing Laravel is a simple setup, but it seems like a lot of simple things also go wrong and if you don’t know how to handle them it can get quite difficult to figure out what is the cause and how to fix it. One of the most common errors you are going to come across is “Laravel: command not found”. There is no need to worry! This error is common even if you have installed everything correctly. Nothing is actually wrong just a small quick fix.

On the official tutorial for Laravel, you will come across the following message that throws quite a few people off.
“Make sure to place the ~/.composer/vendor/bin directory in your PATH so the Laravel executable is found when you run the Laravel command in your terminal.” This means place the location of Laravel to your PATH file so that you can use the Laravel command. If you don’t do this you will see the following when you run a Laravel command.

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Laravel--version

-bash:Laravel:command notfound

I’m going to assume that you have used composer to install Laravel. If not then you will need to update the path below to the location of Laravel on your system. Everything else will remain the same. So the issue here is that the PATH file does not know where Laravel is installed. All you have to do is update PATH so that it knows where Laravel is.

I’m going to break this down a bit just in case you haven’t used composer to install Laravel. $PATH: contains the current contents of the PATH file. This is required so you don’t overwrite the current contents of the PATH. The content after PATH is the location of Laravel. If you use composer it is most likely installed in your users directory. e.g. “/root/.composer/vendor/bin”. You can change the directory to whatever directory you have Laravel installed to. The code below should work if you installed Laravel with composer.

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export PATH="$PATH:~/.composer/vendor/bin"

You should now be able to use Laravel commands regardless of your working directory. To test if this is working, retry the following command.